Tuesday, 4 April 2017

Who lived in Medieval Cambridge?

Central Cambridge has been a site of human occupation for
centuries, if not longer, with evidence of people living in Cambridge from the
Palaeolithic through to the modern day.

Pre-Construct Archaeology is beginning excavations in Cambridge,
at the former West’s Garage on Newmarket Road, to continue filling in the
blanks of our past.

We will be excavating near to Barnwell Priory, which was founded
in AD 1092 by Picot, High Sheriff of Cambridgeshire, and originally based in a
church dedicated to St Giles located near Castle Hill. It moved to Chesterton in AD 1112 and remained
in use as a monastery until 1538, when it was destroyed during the Dissolution
of the monasteries. Surviving structural
remains can be seen at a few locations near the site, including the Cellarer’s
Chequer and the Church of St
Andrew the Less.

During the trial trench
evaluation, we found fantastic evidence of medieval occupation on the
site including multiple wells, formed from clunch and brick. Clunch is a type of hard chalk that was quarried
locally and used as a building material in this part of Cambridgeshire in
medieval times; very successful as interior building decoration, but not the
greatest for outdoor building! Clunch tends to weather quickly, not standing up
to the elements very well. One of the wells contained 19th-century pottery and roof slate/tiles within it, demonstrating the continued use of this area of Cambridge for housing throughout the centuries.

Further updates on the excavations will be posted over the
coming weeks, so keep checking to see what other amazing finds we unearth as PCA continues to #DigDeeper.